A Nationwide Call: You photograph Black Friday. We exhibit your work.

What is Picture Black Friday?

Every year, Black Friday rings in the yearly holiday shopping season, with hundreds of thousands of people getting up before sunrise to queue for bargains and deals; when the doors are unlocked, the stores being besieged by their own customers. During Black Friday 2008, security guard Jdimytai Damour, was trampled to death by crazed shoppers as he tried to hold back bargain seekers at a Walmart in Long Island . Unfortunately, the uproar in the media was mostly over by the end of the initial weekend.

Picture Black Friday is a photojournalism project that aims to revisit and analyze a combination of forces- worsening economic pressures, financial desperation, excitement, fear, and a distinctly American cultural tradition- that culminate the morning after Thanksgiving. This year, “Black Friday” events in the UK and other parts of the globe have begun to pop up, as the USA exports our brand of good ol’ American Consumerism around the globe.

Picture Black Friday is an open call for photographers around the globe to go out and produce images that document Black Friday- how you see it, on your terms. Imagine this project as an open assignment: you have freedom to approach this event from any angle you wish, returning with single images or even a mini-project that documents Black Friday like no other media outlet will. A selection of these images will be exhibited on this site and beyond.

PBF is a curated exhibition with a singular voice. We are pleased to announce that one of our staunchest supporters at Picture Black Friday who has photographed every Black Friday since the projects inception, photographer Sandy Carson has decided to give his time to curate this years exhibition.

For the 2014 edition of the Picture Black Friday project we will be accepting submissions for ten days, beginning on Friday, November 28th through December 7th, via our website. Artists can submit up to 5 of their best photographs of and relating to Black Friday. Photographers may submit a short statement to go along with their images.

Our goal is to give photographers around the country an outlet to share their images on consumerism, the turbulent economic times we live in, and the mass hysteria that retailers and large corporations feed the American buying public all in search of the almighty dollar, be it paper or plastic.